Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse Of The Heart, one of the biggest power ballads of the 1980s, was originally intended for a Nosferatu musical.
Penned by legendary composer and record producer Jim Steinman, the track was revisited on a number of occasions across his career, but found its greatest success with the Welsh singer upon its 1983 release as the lead single from her fifth studio album, Faster Than the Speed of Night.
Impressed by his work on Meatloaf's balls-to-the-wall mega hit Bat Out Of Hell in 1977, Tyler reached out to the songwriter through her record company, CBS, with hopes of a collaboration.
"I’d seen Meat Loaf on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test doing Bat Out of Hell, so I told Muff Winwood at Sony that I wanted to work with Jim Steinman," Tyler told The Guardian during a 40th anniversary reflection on the hit in 2023. "Muff looked at me like I was barmy and told me that Jim would never do it. 'I just want you to ask him,' I said."
Though he initially declined Tyler's offer, Steinman was eventually swayed after hearing demos from the powerhouse vocalist, later stating that she had the "perfect voice" for what he was trying to accomplish, adding: "her performance [on the track] was like an exorcism.”
In the 2023 interview, Tyler revealed: "Around the time we were recording, Meat Loaf had lost his voice, and after it was a hit he always used to say: “Dang. That song should have been mine!” I poured my heart out singing it."
The earliest version of Total Eclipse Of The Heart took form in 1969 for a high school musical Steinman had written and starred in titled The Dream Engine, before returning to the song on a professional basis for a musical based on FW Murnau’s 1922 vampire film Nosferatu.
Composed during a lunar eclipse, the fang-toothed iteration was given the new name of Vampires In Love, though it was "never finished" and finally put aside along with the shelving of the musical. Fortunately, years after Tyler's monumental triumph with the track, it would once again find its teeth for a different bloodsucking musical titled Dance Of The Vampires (Tanz der Vampire), Steinman’s stage adaptation of the 1967 Roman Polanski comedy horror film The Fearless Vampire Killers, which debuted in Vienna in 1997.
Dance Of The Vampires (Tanz der Vampire) was built from an entirely new songlist, aside from Total Eclipse Of The Heart, which was retitled Totale Finsternis for the show. Speaking of the reasoning behind the ballad's inclusion during an interview with Playbill in 2002, the year the show came to Broadway, Steinman explained: "That was an accident almost. I'm surprised it stayed in. But, it was in [the] Vienna [production]. I had only a month and a half to write this whole show and we needed a big love duet.
"But with Total Eclipse of the Heart, I was trying to come up with a love song and I remembered I actually wrote that to be a vampire love song. Its original title was Vampires in Love because I was working on a musical of Nosferatu, the other great vampire story."
He continued, "If anyone listens to the lyrics, they're really like vampire lines. It's all about the darkness, the power of darkness and love's place in [the] dark. And so I figured 'Who's ever going to know; it's Vienna!' And then it was just hard to take it out."
In 2022, Tyler would attend the show's 25th anniversary at the Stage Palladium Theater in Stuttgart as their guest of honour.
Tyler'sTotal Eclipse Of The Heart would go on to become the fifth-best selling single of 1983 in the UK, also shooting to the top of the charts in the US and many other countries across the world. At its highest point it sold an astounding 60,000 copies a day. Thankfully, in the midsts of its globe-spanning mainstream success, the track still managed to retain its gothic roots, with Tyler telling the Guardian: "We shot the video in a frightening gothic former asylum in Surrey. The guard dogs wouldn’t set foot in the rooms downstairs where they used to give people electric shock treatment.”
Unfortunately, Total Eclipse Of The Heart didn't quite make it onto the soundtrack of the newest Nosferatu interpretation by Robert Eggers, but we won't hold this missed opportunity against him for too long.
